Biology subjects

Woller, F.

Publications and source records attributed to Woller, F..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

POME: Graph-based embeddings for partially observed mixed-type data

Partially observed mixed-type (POM) data, as often encountered in clinical, epidemiological, and phenotypic datasets, are very common in biomedical research. Yet, advanced data analysis and machine learning based on POM data is complicated by their heterogeneous nature and often substantial fractions of missing values. While one promising way to overcome these issues is to compute vector-valued embeddings for POM datasets which can then be used for downstream analyses, existing embedding methods are mostly not designed for POM data. To address this gap, we developed POME (partially observed mixed-type data embeddings), a self-supervised model that yields low-dimensional representations of both samples and variables, using shared concept learning and a bipartite graph representation of the underlying POM data. We validated POME through extensive experiments on three real-world biomedical datasets, with diverse downstream tasks and objectives: POME achieves state-of-the-art imputation performance and produces high-quality patient representations that support not only unsupervised discovery of well-separated and clinically meaningful patients subgroups but also supervised predictive modeling and zero-shot representation space mining for use cases such as adjuvant therapy modality recommendation. POME is available as a Python package on GitHub (https://github.com/bionetslab/POME) and PyPI (https://pypi.org/project/pome-py).

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2026

Bridging the gap between genome-wide association studies and network medicine with GNExT

MotivationA growing volume of large-scale genome-wide association study (GWAS) datasets offers unprecedented power to uncover the genetic determinants of complex traits, but existing web-based platforms for GWAS data exploration provide limited support for interpreting these findings within broader biological systems. Systems medicine is particularly well-suited to fill this gap, as its network-oriented view of molecular interactions enables the integration of genetic signals into coherent network modules, thereby opening opportunities for disease mechanism mining and drug repurposing. ResultsWe introduce GNExT (GWAS Network Exploration Tool), a web-based platform that significantly extends the scope of exploration of variant-level effects and significance beyond those provided by existing solutions. By including MAGMA and Drugst.One, GNExT allows its users to study genetic variants in the context of the latest systems medicine approaches, extending to the identification of potential drug repurposing candidates. Moreover, GNExT advances platform implementation well beyond the current state of the art by offering a highly standardized Nextflow pipeline for data import and preprocessing, allowing researchers to deploy their study results on a sophisticated web interface with minimal implementation overhead. We demonstrate the utility of GNExT using a genome-wide association meta-analysis of human olfactory identification, in which the framework translated isolated GWAS signals to potential pharmacological targets in human olfaction. Furthermore, the deployment of a GNExT instance on European-ancestry Pan-UK Biobank data demonstrates the frameworks scalability, resulting in a comprehensive large-scale resource encompassing thousands of traits and enabling new network medicine-based investigations. Availability and ImplementationThe complete GNExT ecosystem, including the Nextflow preprocessing pipeline, the backend service, and frontend interface, is publicly available on GitHub (https://github.com/dyhealthnet/gnext_nf_pipeline, https://github.com/dyhealthnet/gnext_platform). The public instances of the GNExT platform on olfaction and Pan-UKBB are available under https://olfaction.gnext.gm.eurac.edu and https://panukbb-eur.gnext.gm.eurac.edu.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2025

SignifiKANTE: Efficient P-value computation for gene regulatory networks

Gene regulatory networks (GRNs) are graph-based representations of regulatory relationships between transcription factors and target genes. Various tools exist to infer GRNs from gene expression data, but since this task is computationally intensive, statistical significance estimates are often omitted. While permutation-based empirical P-value computation methods are relatively straightforward to implement, they are prohibitively expensive when applied to popular regression-based GRN inference methods and realistically sized datasets. To address this bottleneck, we developed SignifiKANTE. SignifiKANTE is based on the key insight that the background count distributions of groups of target genes may be highly similar, even if their expression vectors show distinct behavior. Relying on this insight, SignifiKANTE employs gene clustering based on the 1-Wasserstein distance to create a small, constant number of background distributions which enables the simultaneous computation of approximate empirical P-values for multiple target genes. This reduces runtime by orders of magnitudes (for some datasets, from several weeks to few hours), without compromising faithfulness of the obtained P-values. SignifiKANTE extends the popular GRN inference package Arboreto and is available as a Python package on GitHub (https://github.com/bionetslab/SignifiKANTE) and PyPI (https://pypi.org/project/signifikante/).

bioinformatics↗